While I was chatting in the bar before
the performance, a guy came round selling single roses. I dismissed
him, as one does, without even really looking at him. Consequently, it
was only around a quarter of the way into Christopher Domig’s 70-minute
monologue performance that I realised he, in the persona of protagonist
Sad, had been the rose-seller. It’s a brilliant way to bring home to us
one of the many the implicit indictments contained in Robert
Schneider’s play.

In the most-produced German-language solo play of the 1990s, only now
receiving its London première, Sad is an illegal immigrant from
Basra who earns a crust in his current home (in effect, the city where
the play is being performed on any given occasion) selling those roses.
His occasional remarks about the home and loves he left behind are
outweighed by his musings on the advantages of life here, and… and this
is where it gets knotty… the damage caused to this way of life by
immigrants. This is not a case of over-assimilation, of one new arrival
decrying the next wave. Sad repeatedly apologises for his appearance,
his habits, even for adding his own volume of effluvia to the sewage
system: “Our urine is more pungent,” he says. But he also says that,
like all Arabs, “I lie. It’s an innate thing with me.” Is Sad short for
Saddam? He claims so at one point, then denies it, but his conduct also
belies his repeated assertion that “My name is Sad, but I am not sad.”

Domig plays it so straight that one cannot tell to what extent Sad is
at one with Schneider in deliberately guying the crassest kind of
bigotry, or conversely how far he has been genuinely ground down by his
host populace’s hostility so that this self-loathing has become
genuine, and so intense that he even accepts responsibility for the
broken glass pushed into his face. What is clear is that hearing this
vitriol as self-accusation reminds us forcefully how horrific it is in
anyone’s mouth. Schneider’s play was written after the first Gulf War,
and for an Austria in which Jörg Haider’s People’s Party was
playing the race card strongly; it is no less applicable 16 years on in
a country which as just sent two British National Party members to the
European Parliament, with a third serving in the London Assembly.